Confluent pricing context

Confluent Cloud uses consumption-based pricing billed on eCKUs (Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka), networking ($/GB ingress/egress), and storage ($/GB-month), with serverless clusters that autoscale to zero when idle. Four cluster tiers exist: Basic (free starting point; first eCKU free, then $0.14/eCKU-hr; ~$0/month estimated), Standard (~$385/month est., $0.75/eCKU-hr, 99.99% SLA on multi-AZ, infinite storage), Enterprise (~$895/month est., $1.75–$2.25/eCKU-hr, private networking, GBps+ autoscaling), and Freight (~$2,300/month est., $2.25/eCKU-hr, optimized for high-volume/relaxed-latency workloads with up to 90% throughput savings). Connectors are billed by throughput and task-hour; Apache Flink by CFU-minute; Stream Governance by environment-hour. Annual commitment discounts scale with total usage. New signups receive $400 in free credits for the first 30–60 days. Confluent Platform (on-premises) uses subscription licensing. Confluent claims up to 60% TCO reduction vs. self-managed Kafka.